Two dice. Your ideas.
The Core Edition is deliberately open-ended. There are no exercises to follow and no prescribed way to use the dice.
Roll a note, a chord quality, or both - then decide what that prompt means for you, your instrument and the music you want to make.
The guides below are starting points, not instructions.
Try an idea. Change it. Ignore it. Take it somewhere completely different.
Chromatic Notes
One note can become almost anything.
Use a roll to explore your instrument, build chords and scales, improvise, compose or simply find somewhere new to begin.
Chord Qualities
Change the harmony. Change the direction.
Explore familiar and less familiar chord qualities, discover new colours and use them as starting points for chords, scales, progressions and improvisation.
The Chromatic Notes Die
Start with a note.
A note isn't an instruction. It's a musical ingredient.
If you roll C, you might:
- find C in several places on your instrument
- play a scale containing C
- build a chord from C
- improvise using C as a target note
- write a melody beginning or ending on C
- find C inside something you already know
Same roll. Different musician. Different result.
The Chord Qualities Die
Now change the colour.
The Chord Qualities Die gives you a harmonic direction without deciding what you should do with it.
Roll Minor 7th, for example, and you could:
- build a minor 7th chord from a note
- find different voicings or inversions
- explore a scale that works with it
- put it into a progression
- improvise over its sound
- use it as the beginning of a composition
The die chooses the quality. You choose the music.
One die gives you a prompt.
Two dice give you a direction.
Notes Die only
C → What can you do with C?
Chord Qualities only
Minor 7th → Where can that sound take you?
Both dice
C + Minor 7th → Explore Cm7.
Cm7 still isn't an instruction.
Find it. Voice it differently. Arpeggiate it. Improvise over it. Put it into a progression. Write something with it.
Chance chooses the starting point.
You choose what happens next.
5 minutes
Roll one die.
Explore the result until the timer ends, but don't reroll just because the first idea feels obvious.
Two rolls
Roll both dice.
Find three completely different musical responses to exactly the same combination.
Pass it on
Roll for another musician.
Compare what each of you does with the same result.
The dice don't get harder. You go further.
Using, say, C + Minor 7th:
Starting out
Find C.
Build or play Cm7.
Listen to how it sounds.
Exploring
Find different Cm7 voicings.
Arpeggiate it.
Put it into a progression.
Experienced
Revoice or substitute it.
Improvise over it.
Use it as the starting point for a composition.
The same two dice can stay useful as your musicianship develops.
Now put it into practice.
These ideas aren't rules. They're simply places you might begin.
Your next roll might take you somewhere completely different.